Lecture: "The Double Execution of Saddam Hussein: Mediation and the Construction of Iraqi Exilic Imaginaries "

This talk examines the London-based Iraqi community’s experiences of, and reactions to, the fall of Saddam Hussein’s statue and his execution three years later. It explores how the live coverage and immediate broadcast of these two events reconfigured the community’s diasporic imaginaries and experiences of exile. Many Iraqis in London reminisced fondly about the fall of the statue in 2003, as a watershed historical moment that they witnessed firsthand through live broadcast on corporate television channels. However, three years later following the capture of Hussein and his trial, the circulation of videos of his hanging by execution, recorded on grainy cellphone cameras and passed person-to-person through Iraqi exile community, had a much different impact.  In this talk I will ask how such new circuitry of image circulation mediated more than the video itself, but a rupture with the past that extinguished the community’s hope of returning home, and instead inaugurated a new horizon for Iraqi politics and nationalism in the space of exile.

Zainab Saleh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College.She earned her Ph.D. in  sociocultural anthropology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on memory, nostalgia, belonging, war, and violence in Iraq and the Iraqi Diaspora. She examines the transformative impact that the US occupation of Iraq had on the London-based Iraqi community’s social and political landscape. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled,  Inhabiting Destruction: Exile, Political Subjectivity, and the Iraqi Diaspora.